"Many people portray the history of race in the United States as the rise of the "one drop of blood" rule. We have made too much of this. It was not the one-drop rule that kept the edifice of Jim Crow so strong. Racism could work through many different rules about ancestry, and it did. It could work even with a great deal of racial mixture. Just because more people are marrying across color lines today doesn't mean race or racism are things of the past."-Ariela J. Gross

The expression of social and cultural identities matter to people in a myriad of ways—seeing one’s self-reflected on campuses, in schools and communities matters (Gaetano, 2015; Laffer, 2017; P., Mindy, 2019). This fact is important to libraries of all types as we think about library collections, services and staff. We know from research and from phenomena all around us that when people see themselves positively reflected in film, books, social media, news, music, theater, that those cultural memory institutions grow in their perceived relevance and significance to their communities (Downing, 2009; Tillson, 2011).

Take as an example, Marley Dias’#1000blackgirlbooks movement. Marley was only ten years old when she launched her movement to donate books to girls of African descent that featured African American female protagonists because not one of her required school readings featured Black girls as main characters (Grassroots Community Foundation, 2019). The We Need More Diverse Books movement has raised awareness and in recent years the number of published diverse books has increased substantially. 28% of the children’s books published in 2018 had main characters who were Asian American, Black, Latinx, and American Indian/First Nation yet only 50% of the children’s books about African Americans are written by people of that background (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, 2019). The numbers for mixed race identities in children’s books are not tracked but they are presumably an even smaller percentage…